Everybody’s watching TOTP2
I
saw a tweet the other day which said something like "If the 1977 me could see
the 2012 me now, he'd say, 'Why are you lying on the floor watching the same Top
Of The Pops as me'?" Hmm.
Interesting thought. I suppose it's a "retromania" kind of question. To
judge by Twitter (or at least my Twitter feed), people do seem to like watching old episodes of TOTP. I guess it's
got "crap TV" value (if you like that kind of thing) and the "deeper" pop-historical appeal of seeing Dave "Kid" Jensen or Kenny Everett or whoever
presenting: "Oh brilliant, it's Peter Powell" = immediate scoff-factor
pleasure but probably accompanied by a frission of something more sincere: "Wow, he looks so young", etc. Oh yeah, and it's got some
music ... You
can obviously get a lot of the TOTP music clips from YouTube any time you like, but I imagine the bulk of Top Of The Pops 2 watchers are 35-55-somethings who like a nice
big dollop of "fun" TV. Stuff they can, if they're so inclined, "Event TV"-tweet about for a few extra kicks. It's an hilarious win-win situation, with
added Abba. OK,
maybe I'm indulging in a bit of supercilious smuggery myself (heaven forbid).
Yes, I've got to admit I do dislike the idea of these programmes (the
knowingness - probably the cynicism - of the programmers who schedule them). "Let's put a whole load of Top Of The Pops from the 70s on. All the 'middle
youth' types! They’ll lap it up." But this is a music blog (if it's anything) so I'm not going to totally diss a programme featuring music, some of it even reasonably OK music (though not much). Yeah, fine, you can get to see three minutes of the Rezillos or something, and that's still worth seeing.
Seeing
it 35 years after the fact, though, is a whole different thing to seeing it
when the song was actually new. Strip away the supposed pleasure of looking
back at these shows "ironically" - or at least with decades of hindsight - and
all you've really got is a bunch of middle-aged people watching mostly mediocre music
from when they were teenagers. It's like your mum and dad in the 1970s barging
you out of the way so they could switch TOTP over to watch a programme about
Glenn Miller or the Joe Loss Orchestra. But somehow worse. It's now being
done behind the protective veil of 21st-century jokiness. Years
ago, when I worked in a record shop, a CBS Records company rep once complained,
in all seriousness, about the Clash's policy of refusing to appear on Top Of
The Pops. "It's ridiculous", he said. "If they just went on once this [their
new record, This Is England] would get into the top 20. No-one cares about being a 'sell-out' now. No-one even knows they refuse to go on." Blimey - it's all raw
commerce, innit? (And by the way, at least today's decades-later re-runs are not
the crude marketing tool of the original shows). My 20-year-old self was, I have to admit, vaguely impressed by Strummer & Co's CBS-bothering intransigence, but now I couldn't much care either way. Not going on TOTP? Wow. Revolutionary. Actually, the fact that you're apparently safe from stumbling upon the Clash during TOTP re-runs almost makes me want to watch a few of them …
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